Conducting More Productive Meetings
Winter 2004

It is a gross understatement to say that meetings occupy an extraordinary percentage of everyone’s time at radio stations today.

Business Week magazine estimates that over 11 million meetings are held in the U.S. everyday. Other studies show managers spend 30% to a whopping 70% of their time in meetings. However, just how much of all that time spent in meetings generates an equal amount of productivity or creativity?

Learn how to be a more effective radio producer from Rick Kaempfer, one of the speakers at the Ozmon Media Creative Programming Workshops February 24 — 26, 2005 in Scottsdale, Arizona Sign up Now >>

One of the biggest meeting challenges in radio today is the daily post-morning show meeting. Many morning shows dread these meetings and for good reasons. Many post-morning show meetings have no structure, purpose or agenda and that causes them often to be a waste of time and energy for everyone involved. Some of these meetings also tend to focus too much time on criticism of that day’s morning show and not enough on what can be done better tomorrow.

The first step towards conducting more productive post-morning show meetings is to create an agenda or template for the meeting. If you are the manager of a morning show you probably want to use some of the meeting time to help shape and guide your morning show. One of the most effective ways to accomplish that is by empowering the morning show to critique itself. This helps build ownership for what happens on the show and demonstrates that you respect the professionalism and expertise of your air personalities.

Consider starting each post-morning show meeting by asking the morning personalities these questions:

• What do you feel were the best moments on today’s show?
• What would you do differently on the show if you had it to do over?

Use the answers to these questions as a springboard for discussions as to why you agree or disagree with your morning show’s assessment of each day’s show and fill in the strengths and the weaknesses you feel they have overlooked. Nine times out of ten you will all agree on what was good and bad on the show. The differences will arise in why something was successful or not and how to convert failures into successes.

After you’ve completed the analysis portion of your post-morning show meeting agenda, move on to preparing and planning for the future. This should be the largest and most productive part of the meeting.

Your morning show planning agenda might look like this:

• What will our audience be talking about tomorrow morning?
• What angle or perspective can we bring to each of those things?
• What are the biggest TV events airing tonight?
• Who will collect and edit the audio from those shows?
• What will we have to give away tomorrow and how will we execute those giveaways?
• What does management need to do or provide for tomorrow’s show?

If you have a morning show producer you can use these post-show meetings to more effectively focus his or her efforts as well. Rick Kaempfer, executive producer for morning personalities such as the Steve Dahl and John Records Landecker suggests in his book The Radio Producer’s Handbook, that the host rarelystays at the station for more than an hour after the show.

In his experience, he says you can effectively conduct the producer planning portion of the post-morning show meeting in ten to fifteen minutes by asking the morning air personalities the following eight questions:

1. Which unused ideas from today are worth saving?
2. Do you have any ideas that came to you during today’s show?
3. Do you need anything for a segment scheduled tomorrow? (For instance, audio or research for a guest or benchmark bit.)
4. What segments from today’s show are worth archiving?
5. Are there any segments from today’s show that we might want to try again in the future?
6. The following celebrities are coming to town. Are there any that you are interesting in?
7. What time are we going to discuss the rundown sheet for tomorrow?
8. If I need to get in touch with you for an emergency, where will you be?

One other reason many air personalities dislike post-morning show meetings is that they are too long. Keep in mind that when morning air personalities get off the air they are emotionally exhausted from the stresses that are inherent in doing a morning show.

People are less productive and have shorter attention spans when they are tired. So, be sure to set a time limit for your post-morning show meetings and end the meetings on time. One way to complete all the items on your post-morning show meeting within a fixed amount of time is to put a firm time limit on how long you will spend on each agenda item.

Prioritize your agenda from what is most important to the success of the show on a given day to what is least important. Then, allot the time to each item accordingly. Make sure the sequence of each item on your agenda is in priority order so that, if time runs out, the less important things are the ones that don’t get discussed that day.

One of the most important rules of meeting effectiveness is the 10/90 rule. This rule says that the 10% of time you spend organizing your meetings before they begin will save you 90% of wasted time in meetings. Taking the time to plan your next morning show meeting is an investment that will pay off in more effective use of your time and an increase in creative dividends on your morning show.